When Did it Happen?

I have experienced various symptoms of mental illness for
most of my life. Even as a young child I had depression. I had my
first manic episode when I was twenty, and at first thought it
was a wonderful recovery after a year of severe depression. I was diagnosed
as schizoaffective when I was 21. I'm 38 now, so I have lived with
the diagnosis for 17 years. I expect (and have been emphatically told
by my doctors) that I'm going to have to take medication for it for the
rest of my life.

I have also had disturbed sleeping
patterns as long as I can remember - one reason
I'm a software consultant is that
I can keep irregular hours. That's a primary reason why I went into
software engineering at all when I left school - I did not think my
sleeping habits would allow me to hold a real job for any length of time.
Even with the flexibility most programmers have, I don't think the hours
I keep now would be tolerated by many employers.

I left Caltech when my illness got really bad at the age of 20. I
eventually transferred to U.C. Santa Cruz
and finally managed to get my physics degree, but it took a long time and
a great deal of difficulty to graduate. I had done well in my two years
at Caltech, but to complete the last two years of classes at UCSC took me
eight years. I had very mixed results, with my grades depending on my mood
each quarter. While I did well in some classes (I successfully petitioned for
credit in Optics) I recieved many poor grades, and even failed a few classes.